Over engineering my homelab so I don't pay cloud providers
5 comments
·August 4, 2025treve
If anyone is looking to get started with a homelab at a good price, I can highly recommend checking ebay for a Dell Wyse 5070. They flooded the market for $50 and are likely powerful enough for many needs. They have a M.2 slot that support SATA. The 'extended' version also has space for a small pcie card and has a parallel and 2 serial ports for a blast to the past.
senectus1
curious to know what you would use this for?
denkmoon
local dns, static site hosting, local apt cache, various other network services (unifi controller if you've got those APs for example), remote/headless dev machine (maybe not for kernel or bigcorp java development), or whatever else you want. mail if you want. Anything :)
Those little thin clients aren't gonna be fast doing "big" things, but serving up a few dns packets or whatever to your local network is easy work and pretty useful.
treve
I use it for media hosting. Backups (connected USB disks), home assistant, syncthing
This was exactly a use case I had in mind when building https://canine.sh -- also uses k3s as a provider, and provides a Heroku-like devex.
How to actually reliably expose a homelab to the broader internet is a little tricky, cloudflare tunnels mostly does the trick but can only expose one port at a time, so the set up is somewhat annoying